Ludum Dare 35 |
While waiting around for the next LD to be announced, I’ve been looking around at other game jams. However none of the other jams I’ve found allow people to vote, rate, rank, and comment on the entries. That’s one of my favorite parts of LD, because it lets you get great feedback and get better. But it looks like others (like Global Game Jam) you just make a game and…that’s it.
Does anyone know of any other good game jams that do ratings/rankings/awards like LD does?
A lot of the game posts have these amazing animated GIFs of people’s games. What do people generally use to make these for Mac/PC?
just curious, thanks!
Several people have said they really liked the Donald Trump pixel art in TRUMP: Political Shapeshifter, the LD35 Compo entry I made. I don’t really consider myself a very good artist, so I thought I’d share how I made it.
First I got a real photograph of Donald and threw it into photoshop. Then I scaled to make it really small and pixely like this:
Then I got the Nintendo Entertainment System color palette from Wikipedia, so I would only use colors from that for authenticity:
Then I made a new layer at 50% opacity and started painting over Donald the best I could, using ONLY the colors from the NES color palette.
At this part, you kind of want to just turn off the part of your brain that recognizes shapes, and just focus on colors and blobs. So don’t think “I’m drawing a head”. Instead think, “I’m drawing a little light yellow spot.”
This gave me something like this:
Then you can turn the opacity back up to 100% and see how it’s starting to come together:
When that was done, then I looked at other NES pixel art images for inspiration to see how they did their outlines. I found this nice picture of Toad. It looked liked they outlined the major parts of his body, the head and then the arms, and then the outline of the whole figure:
That made me want to outline Donald’s body and his head, and also his arms/hands. I also made sure to go and clean up the lines a bit so there was no 2px thickness. This left me with this:
And you’re done! I could probably have cone back and then edited the shading a bit to make it a little cleaner, but I only had 48 hours. 
Hope this is helpful! it’s a technique I’ll definitely use again.
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This idea was inspired by Scott Adam’s commentary, who has been writing at length about the persuasive voodoo that Donald Trump has been up to in the U.S. primaries. He’s not really expressing any real views or doing politics as you’d think you should. Rather he’s just saying whatever he needs to at each stage in order to win. Rather than a lunatic as many perceive him, it seems everything he’s doing is a calculated…game.
He started out as outrageous, and has now started to shift to become more standard conservative, and some think that if he wins the Republican nomination he’ll shift to the center and be more presidential so that he wins. He doesn’t have any consistent positions or platform, so he can change into whatever he wants.
And he says out loud that this is what he’s doing. And it’s working.
So the feelings I have about this game are complex. But he came to mind as a “shapeshifter”.
